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Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Saturday 20th August saw the results of a collaboration by myself and Jonathan Ramirez displayed at Debut Contemporary Gallery, London. Jonathan Ramirez (interviewed here previously) is a digital artist based in Dallas, Texas, and together we have produced five exciting new pieces of art.

In the next few posts I will be telling the story of this special long distance collaboration.

But let's start from the beginning. As some of you may already know, I've been working on a series of drawings inspired by some of my favourite songs or bands and incorporating their lyrics directly in to the art work. Songs by Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Guns N' Roses, Buffalo Springfield and Soundgarden. Making the lyrics form shapes and objects creating a narrative amplified by both the pictoral and written elements. These are images that can carry powerful meanings, messages and emotion.

These are drawn entirely by hand, taking up to a week minimum to design, develop and execute. Using technical drawing pens to be able to incorporate very fine details and text. Not much room for any mistakes and these drawings continue to develop as I progress.

I had always planned on adding colour at a later date to my drawings. As I wanted to keep these black and white versions as they were, I had thought about colouring them digitally as I had done with other pieces in the past.

However, time did not allow me to as I was also creating a series of paintings at the same time.

Busy Painting

Previously i had come across the amazing work of a digital artist called Jonathan Ramirez. He had posted a link to his work on a Facebook page at Juxtapose Magazine. The link was to a piece he called 'Tales of a Scorched Earth'. This got my attention as it reminded me of a song by The Smashing Pumpkins, I looked at more of his work and noticed that most of it was inspired by songs and lyrics, by bands that I also liked or knew. We turned out to both be Smashing Pumpkins fans and so I contacted him to make friends.

Some time passed and I still really wanted to add colour to these drawings. Then a thought occurred to me, it may be interesting to see what would happen if I asked Jonathan to add colour to these pieces. Although his style was different to mine, he understood where this work was coming from as he too was influenced by the same music. I really admired his work and style so I thought that it would be even more interesting if I let him continue to interpret the lyrics and my drawings in his own way, adding his unique style and vision. Fusing our styles and talents. I also thought our collaboration would be interesting from a cultural point of view too, he was from Mexico and I had roots from El Salvador, both from Central America.

I contacted him and asked him if he would be interested in collaborating with me, he said yes and our work together began!